Deh...ah...wha?

Just a small sample of the incredulous noises I make upon discovering people who need a Reality Check bad. Thus do I refute thee!

• So I came across a forum thread asking whether River in Firefly is a Mary Sue. And someone said, "I've come to hate the term Mary Sue, because most of the time it just means a female character who's good at something."
  
  Get off your high horse, buttercup, a Mary Sue is a female character who's good at everything. You know, like ridiculously badly-choreographed fight scenes where ballerinas knock around Adam Baldwin and bad guys from Judge Dredd? And compute astrophysics probabilities in their heads. And, oh yeah, read minds. Without a word of explanation.
  
  Certainly not all female characters who are good at things are Sues. Kat, for instance, in Reach: she's a SIGINT operative. And a sodding Spartan. But that's it, more-than-enough though it is (I still say her death makes no damn sense; she should've had a shield, or else they should've shown that glassing beams knock them down). Or Teela Brown, in Ringworld—a shallow hack like Whedon could never write a character like Teela, because to him, the Teela gene (psionic luck) looks like a Sue. Only, Niven having actual talent for something other than wisecracks and angst, he shows how being lucky all the time can actually suck—see also xxxHolic, and indeed every worldview that incorporates the idea of the Evil Eye.
  
  Every damn one of Whedon's female characters is a Sue. Inara is Sexy Sue, Kaylee is the Sue Next Door and Inventor Sue, Zoe (and Buffy) is Action Sue, and River is Action Sue combined with Wacky Sue (gah, what an ass-lancing word!) combined with Psychic Sue combined with Tortured Sue. Oddly enough, though River is so many different kinds of Sue, she's not the worst one; that'd be Kaylee. Understand that I've had a crush on Jewel Staite since Space Cases, and as a member of the Irish diaspora I hold a grudge against people who use the threat of rape as a weapon. Nevertheless, Whedon is so clumsy a writer that I cannot help but root for Jubal Early in "Objects in Space": that makes those "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" ads (that managed to make Microsoft look like an underdog) look like evil mastermind propaganda; they rock that Victor von Doom-in-Latveria shit by comparison.


• So Objectivists, in yet another example of their being born slaves, hold that force is intrinsically evil, only to be used in self-defense—but once it's called for, anything goes. As Rand said, "Morality ends where the gun begins"; see also Terry Goodkind's gleeful depiction of slaughtering pacifists. This is not the attitude of people with a mature attitude toward force: it is the attitude of moral and physical cowards. Also, when debating Objectivists on the Internet, don't be surprised if they at some point say something like "try and make me". It's the fundamental war-cry of all little bitches who talk a big game in cyberspace but submissively urinate at the first raised voice in person.
  
  But what gets me is the hypocrisy of it. Basically, Objectivists know they're contemptible little weaklings; but, their whole movement being predicated on monstrous egotism—they actually believe humility, even merely being able to laugh at yourself, is evil—they can't be ashamed of it, like actual humans. So they rule that force, the form of power they lack, is immoral. Uh, gee, isn't that exactly how Rand describes Socialists' attitudes toward property? "I don't have that power you have, therefore that power is bad and off-limits". If it was wealth and not "ability to use force", you'd be the first to talk about envy being an invalid basis for morals. Also, there's far less element of chance in the ability to fight than in commercial success.


• Not really a reality check but something interesting, not only might Objectivists and Marxists be described as atheist (and retarded, especially in the former case) versions of Aristotelianism and Platonism, respectively, but they're also the atheist versions of Calvinism and Lutheranism. Basically Objectivists believe that they are the Elect; I dare anyone to find a single policy position the Objectivists don't share with Oliver Cromwell, other than that he had sense enough to oppose adultery, abortion, and pornography. Ditto Marx: the Marxist theory of morals vis-a-vis the class war can be summed up as, "Sin, and sin boldly, but only have faith in the coming worker's paradise and it shall be forgiven you." Luther was a Platonist, come to think of it, and unremittingly hostile to Aquinas (he was an Augustinian, and they never forgave the Doctor for dethroning Augustine).


• So apparently it's supposed to be very racist and horrible, that Philip Sheridan put a bounty on buffaloes, to thin out the herds and force the Indians to be dependent on government rations, for which they had to stay on their reservations. Only, the Indians in question were the Sioux and the Comanche, or, in other words, Land Vikings and fricking Orcs.
  
  See, the incredibly horrible things the Comanche did to captives, especially women and children, were a calculated, asymmetrical-tactics terror campaign. And Sheridan showed admirable restraint, in that his only response was to attack their supply lines—basically the hunter-gatherer equivalent of an embargo. Know what Romanians or Balkan Slavs would've done to them? Hint, it involves red-hot crowns and thrones, and various imaginative uses of sharpened stakes. Yeah, an embargo sucks for the noncombatants, but maybe they shouldn't have based their whole economy on armed robbery aggravated by gang-rape and torture.
  
  To be fair to the Sioux, their occasional forays into war-rape and infanticide were, apparently, mostly due to poor discipline; when there were old men around, the young men usually behaved themselves. They were at their worst during the Dakota War of 1864, and starving people's discipline isn't generally tip-top. That's not the case for the Comanche; raping and torturing captives was a part of their discipline—indeed, it wasn't even "enhanced interrogation", it was the Army Field Handbook.


• So I got Orson Scott Card's book about writing SF and fantasy. Oddly, I don't really like the things he writes, but he writes very well about writing. "Those who can't do, teach", maybe? It is very nice for him that he's won both the Hugo and Nebula twice, though—and being a Mormon and dealing with SF fans has gotta take cojones made from General Products hull.
  
  But in that book he says that H. G. Wells was more serious about his uses of science than Jules Verne. That is the exact opposite of the truth, it is a message from a mirror universe. Presumably one where Verne is clean-shaven.
  
  Late addendum: he also says Verne never seems to see a downside to technological progress. Or, alternatively, he simply chose not to write about it (indeed, he rewrote several of his early stories to have happy endings—"irrational optimism" is considered redundant in France, after all). Do you really think someone whose country shares a border with Germany can't see a downside to tech? That's very, very cute. Also, Nemo and Robur the Conqueror are crazy terrorists, I think that's a downside.


• Finally, and just in general: any argument you make about the early Church, that does not take into account that the first part of the New Testament committed to writing was the Epistles of Paul, is automatically void. The order they go in the book is not chronological, and the Gospels were basically written as "here's more detail on Jesus who Paul preaches".